Ben Caplan is downsizing on his current tour. He’s only bringing along a fivepiece band. That’s a pretty big lineup, but it’s a skeleton crew compared to the more than 30 musicians who played on his new album Birds With Broken Wings.

While recording the album, the Halifax musician collaborated with a diverse group of fellow artists and included several unusual instruments like the darbouka, a North African drum, and cimbalom, a large Hungarian dulcimer.

“The process of making the album was about imagining what it could be if we really sunk into it and imagined what the lushest versions of the songs could be. The recording process was about reimagining the songs for the magic of the studio,” he said.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the live show is sparse. Caplan and his backing band The Casual Smokers have been working on these songs for years. Making the album helped the band figure out what the songs could be, making it easier to scale them for six musicians.

“When we shrunk it back down again these beautiful little remnants stuck with the songs, that I think really enrich the music and the performance,” Caplan said.

Caplan took his time with Bird With Broken Wings. His debut In the Time of the Great Remembering came out in 2011. He didn’t want to rush his second album because he had a feeling it would be an important one.

“I wanted to make sure I could stand behind the record and be proud of it forever,” he said. “There were a few times where it would have made sense to say ‘It’s enough,’ but I just tried to be really cautious of never saying ‘good enough,’ which drove myself and a lot of others crazy. But I’m really glad we kept working.”

There a lot of people – including P-Funk trombonist

Fred Wesley and Joe Grass from Patrick Watson’s band on pedal steel – and a lot of sounds on the record, but it doesn’t sound overdone or messy. Caplan credits that to his producer Socalled (a.k.a. Josh Dolgin) and mixer Renaud Letang (Gonzales, Feist).

“In so many moments on the record there’s a lot going on. On the title track, for example, there are so many noises happening and so many instrumentalists interpreting the song at once and yet, through the editing and mixing, we’ve managed to have it be somewhat coherent.”

Socalled was also instrumental in helping find the album’s unique cast of musicians. Though Caplan had performed with many of the players before, he didn’t exactly have a cimbalom player on speed dial.

Caplan and the Casual Smokers are 30 shows into their North American tour. Saskatoon marks the halfway point. Audiences will benefit from the shows already played.

“We’ve only had two or three days off in the last four weeks so people are going to see a team of musicians who have been working together day in, day out,” he said. “We have an energy and chemistry on stage that has grown out of that.”

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